DeLillo Odds and Ends

This page, as is probably obvious, contains various references
to DeLillo that have been uncovered in some likely and some unlikely
places. Most recent findings on top.

Milo's 'A Toothpaste Suburb' snags title from Cosmopolis

Milo is a young rapper with a 2014 album titled 'A Toothpaste Suburb', taken from a phrase in Cosmopolis. He explains the reference in an interview with KCOU.fm: 'An evening with Milo':

But I guess a toothpaste suburb, in a very literal sense, is from a Don DeLillo novel called Cosmopolis, which is a really shitty Robert Pattinson movie now which you shouldn't watch, but you should READ Cosmopolis. It's about this dude who's like so powerful in the business world, that he doesn’t really even have a home. He just lives in a limousine and he just gets driven around New York all day, and he just makes these billion dollar decisions. And he's like crazy smart, and it's just his life. And at one point he's like on a highway and he pulls over from his like crazy mobile command center, and he just starts shitting on this view that he sees and he calls it a "toothpaste suburb". And I was just like, that's me, you know? Like, I'm the one on the receiving end of that guy's gaze.

The line is actually from the second page of the book, where the character is still in his high-rise condo, but the point stands.

(Mar. 18, 2018)

White Noise epigraph in To Be a Machine

Mark O'Connell's 2017 book To Be a Machine features an epigraph from White Noise. The book's subtitle is "Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death" and features a visit to the Arizona headquarters of Alcor, 1-877-GO-ALCOR. It's a frequently cited bit from Murray Jay Siskind in Chapter 37:

This is the whole point of technology.
It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand.
It threatens universal extinction on the other.
Technology is lust removed from nature.
-Don DeLillo, White Noise

Jack responds, "It is?"

(Nov. 26, 2017)

"The Itch" in Italian

La Lettura published a translation of DeLillo's recent story "The Itch" in September 2017, translated by Maria Sepa. Here is an article that touches upon the story, DeLillo, and other literary topics: Don DeLillo and America's Itch from Sept. 17, 2017.

White Noise film in the works again

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise is to be adapted for the big screen by Michael Almereyda, the writer-director best known for Hamlet and Experimenter.

Almereyda will adapt and direct the story of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies in a fictional midwestern town in the US, who is forced to confront his fear of death when a train carriage derails nearby, releasing a poisonous chemical cloud that hovers over his town.

(March 18, 2017)

Don DeLillo and Dylan's Nobel Prize

La Stampa ran a short interview with DeLillo by Paul Mastrolilli on the occasion of Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which ran on Oct 14, 2016. With some help from Google Translate:

Q: It does that seem fair to give the Nobel Prize for literature to a singer?
A: "Absolutely, in this decision there is nothing that is a problem for me. I listen to Bob Dylan music for decades, and I think he's always been a great artist. "

(Oct 15, 2016)

Don DeLillo and Move-in Day

It's that last line, about the insurance coverage, that has stayed with me. It's like a weapon of contempt that, simply by reading it, one gets to pick up and handle. The book proceeds to veer into domestic comedy, a satire of academic life, and finally to "The Airborne Toxic Event," for which it is famous. But something about this opening pierced me and I always think of it, which is odd, because, although I had a liberal-arts-college experience with the same trappings as described on that first page, my father died when I was quite young. There was no man to send me off, massively insured or otherwise. Maybe that is why I found the low-grade contempt smuggled into those lines so satisfying; they mock the dads' delusion that the worst can be guarded against, mitigated, or hedged.

Orbit on DeLillo

The journal Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon has come out with a special issue on Don DeLillo. Articles include "The Work of Don DeLillo in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: by Graham Foster, "Death and Metafiction: On the 'Ingenious Architecture' of Point Omega" by Brian Chappell, "'Freud is finished, Einstein's next': Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, Chaos Theory, and Quantum Entanglement" by Crystal Alberts, and several more.

"Yeah," Rhodes answers. "That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That's his milieu. And that's what it's like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016."

(May 9, 2016)

Film of The Body Artist

A film production of The Body Artist is apparently in the works in France. See this les inRockuptibles story "Benoît Jacquot va adapter The Body Artist" by Léo Moser dated September 28, 2015. Will have to keep an eye on progress.

Garth Risk Hallberg & City on Fire

Seems like I can't ignore Garth Risk Hallberg even if I might like to. Hallberg make a big splash with the publication of his long 70s NYC novel City on Fire that was fueled by a big advance (sounds like "Rosalita"!). He's quoted as saying: “My goal was to get the book somewhere that is going to allow me to be DeLillo 40 years from now.” He seems to be on quite a different trajectory. Funny connection is that film producer Scott Rudin bought film rights to Hallberg's book on first glance, setting up big expectations - and Rudin also bought rights to Underworld and White Noise at previous times. See this Vulture story "The Unprecedented Garth Risk Hallberg" by Boris Kachka dated October 5, 2015.

I actually had a chance to meet him a couple of years ago. I was on the jury of this little film festival in Portugal - he goes pretty much every year because he loves movies and they pay for him to go over there. He's a really cool, low-key guy. Paul Auster was also there, talking about the movie stars he had breakfast with. DeLillo is not at all taken with that. His wife is a birdwatcher. They're just people. He's very down to Earth, very Bronx. They're older, they have a bit of retired couple thing. He's a little bit like one of his characters at this point.

(May 15, 2015)

Karma publishes 'The Word for Snow'

In a phone call, Mr. Horowitz said he’s done business with Mr. DeLillo for 10 years, recently helping him sell his papers to the University of Texas. Not long ago, he inquired if Mr. DeLillo might have anything in the archives worth publishing.
"Without any arm twisting, Don responded by offering me this text that had never been seen," Mr. Horowitz said. "In typical DeLillo fashion, he probably also said it didn’t deserve to see the light of day but that I’m welcome to do anything with it."

(Oct. 30, 2014)

DeLillo 'reviews' Taylor Swift's white noise

At The Atlantic, Megan Garber crafted a funny item in reference to the pop singer's release of 'Track 3' which turned out to be eight seconds of silence: The Author of White Noise Reviews Taylor Swift's White Noise. Sound actually is a big concern of White Noise. "It is the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone."

(Oct. 27, 2014)

Jason Fulford quotes Emmett Creed

In his photography book CRUSHED from 2003, the epigraph is from Emmett Creed - "It's only a game, but it's the only game." Here's a link to CRUSHED. You can figure out where that comes from.

(June 5, 2013)

William Gaddis letter to DeLillo

In the recently published Letters of William Gaddis (Dalkey Archives, 2013) there's a 1988 letter to DeLillo upon the publication of Libra (reported in the Daily Beast). Here's a piece of it:

...the hard cover arrived here a couple of weeks ago & I’ve just read it & confirmed all my earlier impression, its marriage of style & content—that essential I used to bray about to ‘students’ in those grim days—is marvelously illustrated here I think & especially as it comes together at the end as we know it must, speaking of the ‘nonfiction’ novel if we must but why must we, except that concept does embrace the American writer’s historic obsession getting the facts down clear...

(March 15, 2013)

James Wolcott on DeLillo

In James Wolcott's recent memoir Lucking Out (2011) of his time in New York City in the mid-seventies, he devotes a paragraph to DeLillo (p. 244-45). Here's most of it:

In recent years DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, "Why go on?," his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he's done before, beating him up with his own achievements (Libra, Underworld) instead. His Great Jones Street of 1973 doesn't have the cybernetic density and conspiratorial mesh of his corporate-gnostic-algorithmic probes into power, chance, and paranoia, but its hungover mood evokes the exhaustion and pissed-away promises of the post-sixties, a psychological dehydration requiring a sequestering with none of the skin tingle of A Sport and a Pastime's incognito air. I know, sounds like fun.... And yet its sense of time and place (I love that the novel is named for and set in an actual street with no mythic overtones until DeLillo endowed them) hooks me each time out.... I sometimes wonder if Great Jones Street might not be more highly esteeemed if DeLillo hadn't dubbed his rock-star narrator Bucky Wunderlick, a Pynchonesque moniker that's hard to take seriously for a mystique-ridden Jim Morrison-like lizard king in self-exile.

(Dec. 10, 2011)

Chang-rae Lee reads "Baader-Meinhof"

Last year The New Yorker presented a recording of Chang-rae Lee reading DeLillo's 2002 story "Baader-Meinhof", and you can listen to it right here: Chang-rae Lee reads DeLillo. The recording includes a short intro segment with Lee talking with the fiction editor Deborah Treisman, and some discussion of the story afterward. Lee mentions reading White Noise in college, and then later digging into the catalog and being "overtaken" by DeLillo.

(Mar. 28, 2011)

New Picador DeLillo editions (UK)

A post on the blog A Piece of Monologue displays a set of cover images for DeLillo editions coming out in March 2011 (I think in the UK). Here's a sample:

You can see more of the new covers as well as read a few comments from the designer of these covers, Noma Bar, at this post at Creative Review. Here's one more I especially like:

(Nov. 18, 2010 & Mar. 28, 2011)

TLS on 'rare' DeLillo Interviews

In the August 13, 2010 issue of the Times Literary Supplement included a funny bit on DeLillo interviews in the NB column "Talking it over" by J.C., page 32. Here's a piece:

It appears that DeLillo does want to talk about it. But what is it? In a perfect subversion of the reluctant-interviewee narrative, what DeLillo wishes to talk about is the fiction that he is unwilling to be interviewed.

(Nov. 18, 2010)

William Wood on DeLillo

William Wood has a piece in The Point on "Don DeLillo" (not sure when it originally appeared). He mostly discusses Point Omega and Americana. Here's a piece:

Given these considerations, a plea for the enduring importance of DeLillo's work can profitably focus on Americana, his first novel. Although DeLillo considers himself to have reached maturity only with White Noise, Americana shows a writer having already perfected his voice at its inception. The author's departure in Americana from traditional tropes of plot, character development and so on bears witness that the essence of traditional formal conventions was not the extrinsic form itself but the underlying pathetic dynamic they successfully sustained. Critique of this departure is therefore as irrelevant as would be a critique of modern theater on account of its virtually ubiquitous disregard for the Aristotelian unities of place, time and action. Holding the novel together is DeLillo's forging of a unified effect of language from the formal contradictions of his situation as a writer; those prominent in their partial resolution include the problem of the alternate banality and poetry of both vernacular and self- consciously literary styles.

(August 27, 2010)

Tom LeClair on DeLillo

DeLillo, the man who didn't want to talk about it, somewhat improbably understands things an interviewer can do for a writer. In Point Omega the interviewer listens without objection to the blowsy, self-serving monologues of the aging writer, and when his daughter disappears in the desert it's the young interviewer who helps organize the search and cares for the despairing father. Yes, it's possible the interviewer's sexual interest in the young woman drove her into the desert, but I don't think that was the interviewer's intention. In the end DeLillo's filmmaker, like Kehlmann's journalist and Bolaño's professors, loses the interview. I'm not suggesting this is equivalent to losing one's daughter, just noting that the interviewer's good works go unrewarded.

(August 10, 2010)

David Mitchell on DeLillo

Author David Mitchell has made reference to DeLillo a few times, first in an epigraph to his second novel, Number9Dream (2001), with the line "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose with dreams" from Americana.

In the most recent issue of The Paris Review (Summer 2010, #193), the Art of Fiction interview with Mitchell asks about the epigraph. Mitchell replies "The best line in the book and it's not even mine." Followed by this exchange:

Interviewer: It's pretty obvious what that has to do with your hero, Eiji, an inveterate fantasist who dreams of a father he has never met - but is there a deeper link between Number9Dream and DeLillo?

Mitchell: I read Underworld around that time, and was deeply impressed by it, which led me to Mao II, and Americana, which is where the epigraph is from - but I don't think there's a deeper link between our writing. DeLillo is more of an ideas man than me - than just about any novelist I know, for that matter.

(July 17, 2010)

Cosmopolis film project moving along

Last July was the first news that David Cronenberg was involved with a Cosmopolis project. Yesterday news broke that Colin Farrell and Marion Cotillard are "attached" to the project. Here's the Variety story, with excerpt:

Farrell will play a millionaire Manhattan asset manager who loses all his wealth over the course of one day. Cotillard will play his wife.

Filming tentatively scheduled for March to May, 2011 in Toronto and New York.

(May 13, 2010)

David Foster Wallace Archive

Joining the DeLillo papers, David Foster Wallace's archives have been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Of some tangential interest to this site are the copies of DeLillo novels with Wallace's notes.

(April 25, 2009)

Talking about White Noise

Slate has a 50 minute discussion of White Noise upon its 25th Anniversary, and the discussion is online. Our critics discuss Don DeLillo's White Noise featuring Stephen Metcalf, Meghan O'Rourke and Troy Patterson. Opinion is sharply divided. I have to say I found Patterson's early statement that the book is "flagrantly bad" to be flagrantly judgemental.

Jay Murray Siskind at work!

Mark Sample has uncovered what he calls the 'Littlest Literary Hoax', in a blog post at Sample Reality on July 16, 2009. Here's the scoop:

I am referring to "An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent," a review of David Foster Wallace's work that appeared in the prestigious journal Modernism/Modernity, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Found in the Volume 11, Number 4 issue (2004) of Modernism/Modernity, the review focuses on Wallace's last collection of short stories, Oblivion, and is attributed to a certain Jay Murray Siskind, Department of Popular Culture, Blacksmith College.
Anyone familiar with White Noise should recognize the clues that the supposed reviewer is DeLillo's character and not some real live scholar with the same name: there's the fictional Blacksmith College (which, while not the college portrayed in White Noise, is a name of one of the neighboring towns); there are the fake footnotes in the review referring to other characters and details from White Noise, including narrator Jack Gladney and thuggish Alfonse Stompanato)

As the journal's book review editors at the time, we were at first disconcerted to receive an email from Jay Murray Siskind. Our suspicions were heightened when we noted that his email address read "blacksmith.edu," rather than the better known College-on-the-Hill, where Murray was last seen working. But research soon revealed that his change in academic affiliation was the result of a bitter tenure decision fight, in which Alfonse Stompanato had played an especially unsavoury role.

All good academic fun, except when some folks end up thinking it's legit!

(July 21, 2009)

DeLillo in a classroom!

A: I teach at Hunter College in New York and recently had Don DeLillo come to class. It was an extraordinary day. He was incredibly profound and moving and gracious and just plain honest with the students. I was also stunned by his humility. At one stage he said to us, "I seem to be the beneficiary of an occasional revelation." This is the man who wrote Underworld, one of the best novels of the last 25 years. We went out afterwards with a couple of students and had dinner, and a few drinks, and I watched him climb into a cab, and I thought that I would like to be that mind, I would like to sit inside that mind, if even just for a while, traveling home to Bronxville on a March night in 2009. I would very much like that indeed, to be going in that direction.

McCann's the author of the recent novel Let the Great World Spin, set in New York City in 1974.

(July 11, 2009)

Unlikely Funding for White Noise film?

In this Huffington Post item by Vickie Karp on June 7, 2009, "Lotto Winner Gives Millions to the Arts", lotto winner Cynthia Stafford claims in the interview to be funding development for a film of DeLillo's White Noise.

Third Screen: You are now the executive producer of a major forthcoming film based on Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985. How did that come about?

Stafford: Don Delillo's novel, White Noise, has a strong and really loyal following, and everyone's wanted to see this happen for a long time. The option process was circling for over 20 years before I came along. Don had sort of given up. Another production partner and I secured the option. I'd read the novel. I loved it. I rescued it.

In May 2007 she won $112 million in the multi-state Mega Millions lottery with her father, Robert Stafford Sr., and brother, Robert Stafford Jr. The three divided a lump-sum payment of $67 million.

We'll see what happens!
(July 11, 2009)

DeLillo rarity re-published

For those interested in reading DeLillo's pre-Americana work, some good news! The Kenyon Review has published a new anthology of pieces previously published in the journal, and it includes DeLillo's 1966 story "Coming Sun. Mon. Tues." Details here: Readings for Writers.

But the New Yorker has a strange item that also claims to be from the man, The Final Word posted by one Ligaya Mishan on Oct. 10 (a followup to earlier posts of Oct. 9 and Sep. 30):

Yes, I posted a blog for The Onion, but this was four years ago at the Republican Convention in New York. Evidently the report has been orbiting the blogosphere all this time. Note the prophetic reference to Sarah Palin.

Who's fooling who?

Passing of a great Librarian

A number of recent news stories have run on the passing of Anna 'Jeanne' Layton at age 77, a Utah librarian who fought back against the censorship of Don DeLillo's first novel 'Americana' in 1979 and temporarily lost her job for it. From the story:

Layton set Utah abuzz and grabbed national headlines in 1979 when she was fired for refusing to pull the titillating novel Americana from the shelves of the Davis County Library.

She fought the dismissal and eventually won back her job.

The Davis County Commission labeled the book by Don DeLillo "obscene." But Layton argued that library patrons had a right to choose what they read.

"It's not the library's role to determine choices for adults," she told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1990 as she prepared to retire after 30 years. "It's important for the library to serve everyone in the community, not just select groups."

DeLillo at the stadium

Here's a real rarity - a DeLillo candid shot! It was taken
by the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, Andreas Brown, at Yankee
Stadium, showing DeLillo along with Paul Auster and two Gotham
employees. Posted on the FineBooks
blog back in May 2007.

(Dec 23, 2007)

End Zone - the movie! (Someday, maybe)

News has been trickling out about a project to film End
Zone. In summer 2007 a story appeared in Time Out London reporting
that "Hartnett enters 'End Zone'", actor
Josh Hartnett signing up for the project set to start filming
in January 2008 in Texas.

The project is headed up by George Ratliff, and this interview from IFP.org gives some background
on him. Interesting note: "Just after attending film school
at the University of Texas, Ratliff returned to his hometown of
Amarillo, Tex., to make Plutonium Circus (1995), an offbeat look
at a nuclear-weapons factory and the community it supports."
Here's Ratliff writing the script for End Zone:

I was interested in adapting Don DeLillo's End Zone. I had
begged for the rights for two years. I sent DeLillo a spec script,
which he liked enough to give me an option. That's when I teamed
up with David Gilbert to help me write a much better draft. In
the end, we had a great script but had a hard time setting it
up.

Ratliff makes mention of the End Zone project in another story
on his film "Joshua" that ran in the Boston Globe
on July 11, 2007, "His fear really is close to home"
by Joel Brown.

Having completed a hot genre picture, Ratliff and Gilbert
might be expected to consolidate their gains via a similar film
with a slightly higher budget and bigger stars.

But no, they're adapting -- gulp -- a Don DeLillo novel, "End
Zone."

"This is the DeLillo that people don't know about,"
Ratliff said. "This is his second novel. It's a very funny
football satire, but it's sort of football obsessed with, you
know, apocalyptic warfare."

People are always saying how easy it is to film DeLillo, right?
Ratliff laughed. "Yeah," he said. "DeLillo is
sooo adaptable."

A story in Variety "Hartnett runs to 'End Zone'" on
November 8, 2007 seems to confirm that all is set to go on the
project. Filming now to commence in February 2008 in New Mexico,
and will also star Sam Rockwell.

Update on Sept. 7, 2008: A story on actress Kat Dennings "Dennings revels in her dark side" by Jim Slotek, Toronto Sun (no longer online) indicates that filming never started.

But her dream project, End Zone, has yet to be greenlit.

"It's based on a Don DeLillo novel and it was supposed to be me, Sam Rockwell and Josh Hartnett. The plot is centred around football but it's really about nuclear war, essentially, so that's why it's hard to sell. It's in the top five best scripts I ever read.

"Although I find usually if I want something too badly, it doesn't work out."

Well, let's hope she backs off a little!

DeLillo and White Noise make the big time! YouTube has
the piece, called "Lazy School Day". The lazy school
boys drop some basic knowledge on DeLillo (his birthdate and year
of the first novel), then give the "basic scoop on the White
Noise text."

In another multimedia item, a story from Dec. 7, 2006 reports
that a New York theater company has been awarded a grant that
will be used for a DeLillo-related production. The pertinent info:

The Collapsable Giraffe will use its award to allow costume
designer Tara Webb to incorporate wireless video and sound devices
into her costumes for their upcoming production Pee Pee Maw Ma,
inspired by Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street.

The New York Times conducted a survey of 125 writers to
find their choice for the 'Best Work of American Fiction in the Last 25
Years' and DeLillo's Underworld came in number two
(behind Toni Morrison's Beloved). Two other DeLillo novels
showed up among the contenders, White Noise and Libra.

Like "American Pastoral," "Underworld"
is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful nostalgic
undertow back to the redolent streets of a postwar Eastern city.
Baseball and the atom bomb, J. Edgar Hoover and the science of
waste disposal are pulled into its vortex, but whereas Updike
and Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face
of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal,
of implication and missing information.

P.S. It's important to understand how this survey was conducted.
Each of the 125 voters got just a single vote - their pick for
single best work of American fiction. Underworld was chosen
by 11 people, White Noise by 3 or 4 (it's unclear) and
Libra got 2 votes. Beloved was chosen by 15 voters,
and various novels by Philip Roth garnered a total of 21 votes,
with American Pastoral getting the most at 7 votes. I think
that the format of this survey was not fully grasped by many pundits
who complained about the lack of diversity.
(May 19, 2006)

DeLillo gets a mention in a recent article on young novelist Benjamin Kunkel (author of Indecision).
The article is "Welcome to the polical world" by
Stephanie Merritt, and ran in the Guardian on Nov. 20, 2005.

The only disappointment was that the patron he really wanted
didn't quite come up with the goods. 'When I was at college,
I and half the young men I knew wanted to be Don DeLillo,' he
says, when I ask which contemporary writers he does read. 'I
sent him a copy of the book, hoping he might give me a blurb.
I didn't get one, but he sent me a postcard that just said 'Kunkel?
Wasn't there a pitcher for the Yankees named Kunkel?' It's displayed
prominently in my apartment.'

Kunkel went to Harvard, and is one of the folks responsible
for n + 1.
(Nov. 21, 2005)

The new Summer 2005 issue of Bookforum has a
cover story entitled "Pynchon Now" which includes appreciations
by a number of authors, including DeLillo. Note that the main
piece on Pynchon is by Gerald Howard, a former editor of DeLillo's
in the eighties. It's all online at the moment, but for the sake
of posterity I post the entire DeLillo item here as well.

It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died
one day and Pynchon was born the next. One literature bends into
another. Pynchon has made American writing a broader and stronger
force. He found whispers and apparitions at the edge of modern
awareness but did not lessen our sense of the physicality of
American prose, the shotgun vigor, the street humor, the body
fluids, the put-on.

I was writing ads for Sears truck tires when a friend gave
me a copy of V. in paperback. I read it and thought, Where
did this come from?

The scale of his work, large in geography and unafraid of
major subjects, helped us locate our fiction not only in small
anonymous corners, human and ever-essential, but out there as
well, in the sprawl of high imagination and collective dreams.

(May 26, 2005)

Novelist Jonathan Lethem has some
interesting comments about his feelings for DeLillo in a piece
called "The Beards" in the Feb. 28, 2005 New Yorker
(the piece is labeled 'Personal History' and is a kind of memoir
of Lethem's artistic obsessions):

I've rarely read Don DeLillo since the binge years, when I
feverishly read and reread every one of his novels, and now,
when I do, I find myself stirred but confused. The moment Don
DeLillo became in any way fallible to me, I experienced a rupture
I'm still traumatized by, one that colors my ability to situate
him reasonably in my internal landscape of "contemporary
letters" -- he's either as great as I thought he was when
I thought he made all other writing look silly or he's a total
disaster.

..

By trying to export myself to a place that didn't fully exist,
I was asking works of art to bear my expectation that they could
be better than life, that they could redeem life. I asked too
much of them: I asked them to also be both safer than life and
fuller, a better family. That, they couldn't be. At the depths
I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works fo art became
thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I
found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.

The was especially true of anything that assumed a posture
of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur.
Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard,
and Talking Heads.

(February 26, 2005)

Young pop star Conor Oberst
(Bright Eyes) is name-dropping on his new CD "Digital Ash
in a Digital Urn." According to a story by Shannon Zimmerman
that appeared in the Washington Post on Jan. 26:

"Gold Mine Gutted" finds Oberst chasing "Don
DeLillo whiskey" with a farewell to the "sorrowful
Midwest" as his band whips up a chilly soundtrack that the
Cure's Robert Smith could proudly call his own.

(January 29, 2005)

Poet Ann Lauterbach includes
a poem entitied "A Novelist Speaks (Don DeLillo)" in
her collection If in Time. Note that DeLillo provided a
blurb for this book.
(January 22, 2005) Game 6
will have its world premier at Sundance at the end of January 2005; the first
DeLillo scripted film. A number of stories appeared today with
some details: here is a link to one.

The film is described as follows:

Game 6 / U.S.A. (Director: Michael Hoffman; Screenwriter:
Don DeLillo) - Combining real and fictional events and centered
around the historic 1986 World Series, this is a day-in-the-life
snapshot of a playwright who skips his own opening night to watch
the momentous game. World Premiere.

(December 1, 2004)

More news on the movie front!
It looks like DeLillo's unpublished screenplay "Game 6"
has been filmed in New York City this summer. My understanding
is that this is a fairly low-budget affair, but did attract some
names.

Also choosing New York City as a prime location is director
Michael Hoffman, who is shooting "Game 6", starring
Michael Keaton and Robert Downey, Jr. The film follows a playwright
on the day of the legendary game six of the 1986 World Series
between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox, and is scheduled
to shoot through August 11.

I imagine it may be a year or so before it is released.
(September 3, 2004)

News on "White Noise"
- the movie! Sounds like things are moving along, according to
a report from Variety, written by Dana Harris and David
Rooney, on July 28, 2004. Here's the pertinent bits:

Barry Sonnenfeld has teamed with Cherry Road Films on Don
DeLillo's White Noise, which he will direct and produce,
reports Variety.

Stephen Schiff adapted the script for White Noise,
winner of the 1985 National Book Award. Sonnenfeld told the trade
that casting would begin immediately. He also hopes the project
will regain sole claim over its title, which is shared by an
upcoming Michael Keaton thriller from Universal Pictures.

The story is a dark comedy in which a professor must contend
with a wife who's possibly drug-addled, four kids who are too
progressive for anyone's good and a chemical plant that has accidentally
released a cloud of potentially lethal gas.

Given the way these things usually go, I wouldn't recommend
holding your breath!
(July 31, 2004)

Robert Mailer Anderson's novel Boonville
(2001) has an epigraph from DeLillo's Underworld.

Singer Rhett Miller (from the Old 97's) name-drops DeLillo
on his 2002 solo album, in the song "World Inside the World."

The recently published novel A Thing (or two) About Curtis and
Camilla by Nick Fowler (Pantheon Books, 2002) drops a few
DeLillo references. Check page 23 for a little round picture of
the Man within a boxed footnote (in reference to a name check
of White Noise as a favorite book of the title characters).
I also saw a second footnote reference on page 156; there may
be more.David Bowie has been dropping references
to DeLillo lately (summer 2002).

In the Rolling Stone of 8 Aug. 2002, Mim Udovitch's
"Q & A: David Bowie" (p. 30) features the
following exchange.

[DB:] What I'm good at is low-level nagging fear.
[MU:] But of what?
[DB:] My shoes. I mean, they're just not right.
[MU:] Seriously. A fear of what?
[DB:] What did Don DeLillo call it? The hum of anxiety? In one
of his novels, he describes the thing that permeates the city.
But, you know, it's a thing like that.

(thanks to Phil Nel for this one)

Then in the 9 June 2002 New York Times Arts & Leisure
section (p. 30) in an article by Jon Pareles entitled David Bowie, 21st Century Entrepreneur,
Bowie is talking about a song written prior to Sept. 11th:

"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick
up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within
our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that
it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen.
It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal
crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project
into physical situations. You make little stories up about how
you feel. It is as simple as that."

(thanks to Craig Brown)

David Mitchell's second
novel Number9Dream (2001) uses a line from Americana
as its epigraph:

"It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to
dispose of dreams."

David Bowman's This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of
Talking Heads in the 20th Century (New York: HarperCollins,
2001) has this on the dedication page: "This history is for
my good friends Brian Breger and Bucky Wunderlick." On the
next page, two epigraphs:

DeLillo quoted in unlikely places? Check out
the Red Herring issue of March 5, 2002, where Dinesh D'Souza,
prominent young conservative commentator (and author of the upcoming
What's So Great About America) opens his "Technology
and moral progress" column with some lines from DeLillo's
"In the Ruins of the Future" essay.

"Technology is our fate, our truth," the novelist
Don DeLillo writes in the December 2001 issue of Harper's
magazine. "We don't have to depend on God or the prophets
or other astonishments. The miracle is what we ourselves produce."
Mr. DeLillo argues that our technological civilization is what
the Islamic fundamentalists hate most. "It brings death
to their customs and beliefs."

D'Souza seems to generally agree, and goes on to argue that
technology often produces moral gains, for instance the emancipation
of women, the extension of human life span, and the abolition
of slavery. He doesn't say much about Islamic customs and beliefs.

An essay by James Woods in The Guardian published October
6, 2001 entitled "Tell me how does it feel? US novelists
must now abandon social and theoretical glitter" mentions
DeLillo prominently.

The Great American Social Novel, which strives to capture
the times, to document American history, has been revivified
by Don DeLillo's Underworld, a novel of epic social power. Lately,
any young American writer of any ambition has been imitating
DeLillo - imitating his tentacular ambition, the effort to pin
down an entire writhing culture, to be a great analyst of systems,
crowds, paranoia, politics; to work on the biggest level possible.

...

For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and
society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing
his novel Mao II - a novel that proposed the foolish notion that
the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is,
"alter the inner life of the culture"? Surely, for
a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as
analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly.
Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations.
It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.

Many have commented on the slightly eerie connection of the cover of
Underworld to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Center buildings. Vince Passaro wrote a short piece entitled "Don
DeLillo and the Towers" which appeared at a web site entitled
Mr Bellers Neighborhood. This piece also appears
in print in the Mr Bellers book on New York City that came out
in Feb. 2002.

The image came back like lightning: I went out to the hall
and pulled the book from the shelves, and there it was, the two
towers, dark and enshrouded (by fog, much as they had been by
smoke early Tuesday morning); before them, the stark silhouette
of the belfry of a nearby Church; and off to the side, a large
bird, a gull or large pigeon, making its way toward Tower One.

(See also the writeup on the documentary film Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y.
below)

You know you've hit the big time when the parodies start.

Here's a piece from McSweeney's by Neal Pollack entitled
"DeLillo
in the Outback" which is The Body Artist on Survivor
II, I think. It begin's like this:

You sit in the airplane preparing for the adventure of your
life. Only you don't know it is your life, and as the plane descends
you hear a sound, a piercing of the air, and it is someone barfing.
You are amound strangers, sixteen in number, yet they are, also,
familiar, a mote of memory in a schism of time.

In the year 2000, the New York Times Magazine seems to
have picked DeLillo as the choice name to drop for instant pomo
credibility.

October 1, 2000, in Gerald Marzorati's article on Radiohead,
the following parenthetical comment sneaks in:

In a September article on Salman Rushdie's first year in New
York City, we are told of his meetings with other authors:

HE SAYS HE IS RELIEVED that New York has less of the 'backbiting
and incestuous' literary culture of London. He had dinner in
April with Thomas Pynchon and discussed baseball. He knew a bit
about this, having already gone to both of the city's ballparks.
With Don DeLillo he went to a Yankees game. 'I must say, going
to the ballgame with Don was one of the great things, because
he goes with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball.' Paul
Auster in turn took him to see the Mets, 'because that's his
orientation'.

I suspect there have been quite a few more, not that we need
to list them all!

From page 534 of Kurt Andersen's Turn of the
Century (Random House, 1999), the character Bennett Gould's
scheme to buy up the rights of contemporary fiction is described:

Salon published an interesting piece called
'Would you buy
a new car from this novelist?
by James Poniewozik, on the New York Times Book Review's
use of DeLillo-related material in a special supplement linked
to Intrigue, a new car from Oldsmobile.

There's a documentary film out entitled Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y which utilizes passages from Mao II and White Noise made
by Johan Grimonprez of Belgium.

Blurbs written by DeLillo
for other books. DeLillo on his readers (from DeCurtis):

One segment of my readership is marginal, but beyond that
I find it hard to analyze the mail I get and make any conclusions
as to what kind of readers I have. Certainly White Noise
found a lot of women readers, and I don't think too many women
had been reading my books before that. So I really can't generalize.
In the past I got a lot of letters from people who seemed slightly
unbalanced. This hasn't been happening for the past three or
four years. It seems that the eighties have been somewhat more
sane than the seventies, based on my own limited experience of
measuring letters from readers. I've reached no conclusion about
the kind of readers I have based on the mail I get. There are
all sorts.

DeLillo appears in "The Canon" by
"experts in various disciplines," which ran in The
New York Times Magazine (September 29, 1996), pp. 176-8. In
connection with the magazine's focus on "The Next Hundred
Years," they asked "What works created in the late 20th
century will still be discussed, viewed, read and cherished 100
years from now?" Each "expert" offered one work.
Michiko Kakutani, the Times' senior book critic, chose
White Noise. She writes:

When White Noise was published, it read like an apocalyptic
satire. Sure, it was a dazzling virtuosic meditation on death
and the terrors of ordinary life, but it was also a darkly comic
sendup of a futuristic America, tottering on the brink of extinction.
Today the novel's characters -- scholars who specialize in Elvis
and cereal boxes, ashram dwellers in Montana, doctors who dispense
drugs that promise to alleviate the fear of death -- have grown
decidedly more recognizable. Who knows, by 2096 the novel may
be read as a grimly naturalistic portrait of millenial America,
an America in which people turn to cults and obsessions and conspiracy
theories in a desperate effort to lend a sense of order to their
lives, an America in which everyone is mesmerized by the 'sealed-off,
timeless, self-contained, self-referring' narcotic of television,
and 'everything we need that is not food or love is here in the
tabloid racks' (178).

Paul Auster's 1992 novel Leviathan is dedicated
to Don DeLillo.
Check out the results of a discussion
group on DeLillo's White Noise held back in 1995. Item
11 was a letter from DeLillo to the group, now posted in full on
the Writing page..
A few notes on the DeLillo-Joyce connection.
In the book Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-a-Rama
(Delta, 1996) there is a short article entitled "My Favorite
Rock & Roll Novel" by Dean Wareham of the band Luna, which describes
his love for DeLillo's Great Jones Street. On the Luna
album Bewitched (Elektra, 1994) there is a song "Great
Jones Street."

DeLillo and Lish

Gordon Lish wrote a strange little article entitled "What
I know about Don DeLillo and certain other unnamed persons,"
which unsurprisingly doesn't really tell too much. He ends by
saying that "What Don DeLillo is really like is just like
the three other literary geniuses I know. Indefatigably nice.
Heroically sane. Hugely polite. Inexhaustably responsive. And
a model of good citizenship besides." From Saturday Review,
Sept 16, 1978.

Lish dedicated his books My Romance and Mourner at
the Door to DeLillo. Lish's new book Epigraph (Four
Walls Eight Windows, 1996) is also dedicated to DeLillo.

Lish also wrote an afterword to the publication of DeLillo's
first play, "The Engineer of Moonlight", in which
he attacks those who would call DeLillo's vision bleak. "Where
we are and where we are going is where DeLillo is. He is our least
nostalgic writer of large importance."

Mao II is dedicated to Gordon Lish. In The Names,
an acknowledgement is given to Atticus Lish, who is Gordon's son.
DeLillo says he used the childhood writing of Atticus to help
create the last chapter of The Names.

Vanity Fair ran a short profile on Lish and DeLillo
in the June, 1991 issue. It's called "The Sunshine Boys"
by James Wolcott. DeLillo is described as "America's leading
literary diagnostician."

A letter from DeLillo to Lish is quoted in the article "The
Carver Chronicles" by D.T. Max, published in The New York
Times Magazine, August 9, 1998. The article concerns Lish's
role as editor for Raymond Carver, and the extent to which he
shaped the early stories. DeLillo's letter advises Lish to keep
quiet about his influence: "It is too much to absorb. Too
complicated. Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at
best."

The DeLillo/Lish connection makes another appearance in Gerald
Howard's article I
was Gordon Lish's Editor published at slate.com on October
31, 2007. The pertinent bit:

It was Don DeLillo's fault. I was working for W.W. Norton
in 1991 when he gave me a call. I'd had the privilege of being
his editor on Libra, and we'd stayed friends. Lish had also been
Don's editor at Esquire, and DeLillo had dedicated one of his
novels to him. After some pleasantries, Don came to the point:

"Gordon Lish is looking for a new publisher."

2014: I can't resist sticking something in here about Atticus Lish.
Remember that DeLillo used some writing by young Atticus in The Names.
Life is With People is a 2012 book of drawings and writings by
Atticus Lish - more about it right here. He also does Chinese translation work.

Check the May 9, 1997
issue of Entertainment Weekly (page 71) to see where DeLillo
stands on the "reclusiveness" scale (1 to 10)!

DeLillo is a 7 compared with Pynchon at 8 and Salinger at 10.
DeLillo is described as being made famous by "the 1985 novel
White Noise, a bible for disenchanted yuppies." Claims
he "frequently uses his fictional characters to dis the whole
celebrity thing."
(This silliness may explain why some smart authors choose to be
"reclusive"!)

The June 1998 issue (p.
166) of Vanity Fair reports that X-Files actor David
Duchovny was in the middle of Underworld at the time of
the interview.
Here's a real DeLillo obscurity:

"The Image and The Crowd" Creative Camera (April
1993)

The Creative Camera piece consists of a two-page photograph
of a television screen tuned to a dead channel--or maybe just
a very fuzzy channel--with on-screen information scrolled across
the top "CH.01 27-SEPT-9? 22:34:40." Scrolled across
the bottom is the following superimposed text: "I keep thinking,
without too much supporting evidence, that images have something
to do with crowds. An image is a crowd in a way, a smear of impressions.
Images tend to draw [people?] together, create mass identity ...".
In the very bottom right side of the right-hand page, beneath
the quotation, are the words "Don DeLillo."